January 11, 2012 AT 8:11 am

Would you be interested in a Vernier interface shield for the Arduino?

[Editor’s note: This is a post from our education blogger Adam] I have created a preliminary shield that allows for the interface of both analog and digital Vernier (www.vernier.com) sensors to the Arduino. The main idea is that an Arduino is significantly cheaper, and in my opinion more effective, then “black box” interfaces. Not to mention that using an Arduino opens the door to having the students explore just how sensors work.

8 Comments

I would like to see a vernier interface. It would be a great way to interface small cnc machines to the arduino but to do that there needs to be an easy way to connect more then one arduino. Multiplexing?

I can’t tell from the post who is running this survey. Is this vernier or akemp?

Either way, I’ve been working on the software side of this for the past week. I’ve been taking a slightly different approach, trying to connect the vernier sensors to an arduino and then to an iPad by reprogramming the 8u2 to show up as a usb-midi device.

I’m very interested in this. I teach high school physics and an electronics with Arduino class. I’ve been looking at using Arduino as a cheaper alternative to Vernier for awhile. My biggest stumbling block has been a lack of any real programming expertise.

It would be most interesting if this allowed for the easy creation of custom sensors that could also be interfaced in the same was as the Vernier sensors. It would be great, for example, to be able to use something like the LoggerPro software to collect data from SparkFun’s 250g accelerometer.

If you’re interested I have a lot of experience with both Vernier hardware and Arduino and would be willing to help out in anyway I can.

Fantastic! I love this idea. The goal is to have science be as open and inexpensive as possible and the precision and quality of the vernier probes coupled with the flexibility of the Arduino would be a great pair.

Once this comes out, I’ll build the functionality into my Android app PhysicsGizmo so there are even more possibilities to connect vernier probes.